"The Acer C7 Chromebook I reviewed last month is basically a stripped down laptop running Chrome OS instead of Windows. Acer sells the laptop for about $200. Now the company has a $300 model for folks looking for slightly better specs.

The new Acer C710-2605 features an 11.6 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display and a 1.1 GHz Intel Celeron 847 processor, just like the original model.

Acer's new laptop also has the same HDMI, VGA, Ethernet, and 3 USB ports, and customers get 100GB of free Google Drive disk space for 2 years.

What makes the new model different is that it comes with 4GB of RAM instead of 2GB and a 500GB hard drive instead of a 320GB disk. Acer is also bumping up the battery from a 2500mAh to a 5000mAh battery pack which is said to last for up to 6 hours.

Honestly, you could probably upgrade the RAM in the original model yourself for far less money -- although you'd have to break a sticker saying you're voiding your warranty to open up the laptop.

While a little extra hard drive space is never a bad thing, it seems kind of unnecessary in a Chromebook, where the browser is the most important (and pretty much the only) app.

So the best reason to choose the $300 Acer C710-2605 over the $200 Acer C7 is probably the beefier battery. The model I reviewed managed to get about 4 hours of battery life, but the new model should get something closer to all-day battery life.

I also noted that the C7 I reviewed is capable of running Ubuntu Linux -- but that battery life fell to just over 2 hours when running that operating system. It's likely that the higher capacity battery in this new model would hold up a little better under Ubuntu as well as Chrome OS."